What is Mari Lwyd?
Over the last decade, an old Welsh tradition has sprung back into popularity, showing up on people’s doorsteps every Christmas season.
By Marybeth Connaughton
A Mari Lwyd spotted in 2011. (Credit: R. fiend)
Imagine it’s mid-December and you’re preparing for Christmas festivities when you hear a knock at the front door.
Instead of carolers or people asking for end-of-the-year donations to charities, staring down at you is a massive horse’s skull. It has the bottoms of glass bottles where its eyes would be. Its overly long jaw is spring loaded, allowing it to mime the words coming from the person hiding beneath it. They’re hidden under a white sheet, gripping a pole that holds the skull aloft. The creature is known as a Mari Lwyd, and it wants you to let it into your house.
Mari Lwyds — which means "grey mare" in Welsh and is pronounced MAH-dee luid — are part of a tradition dating back to pre-Christian times. At the close of every year, people would go door-to-door performing in the guise of this scary-looking horse, in the hopes of receiving food and drink.
Because when the Mari Lwyd showed up on one’s doorstep, the point wasn’t just to spook people. It would ask you riddles and tell you rhymes, often using wit and insults. If the Mari Lwyd won the battle, despite the homeowners’ efforts to keep it out, the horse — or rather the person operating it — would then be allowed inside for libations and vittles, as well as a bit of celebration.
Letting a Mari Lwyd into your house was also considered good luck, and the horse was thought to bestow good fortune on the house as it left.
But the Mari Lwyd is a Welsh tradition that is not practiced as much these days. Until the last 15 years or so, it had all but died out.
“I am Welsh and have never heard of this,” a person on Reddit commented under an article about the custom.
“Neither my parents nor my Welsh-speaking grandparents had any idea what this was about,” said another.
However, in a small town in the south-eastern corner of the country, the Mari Lwyd tradition is being resurrected with increasing popularity.
A local newspaper has deemed it the "newest old tradition in Wales."
Held every January since 2004 in the town of Chepstow, the event features a combination of Welsh and English folk traditions. There is morris dancing, where dancers move in group formations, sometimes across a pair of crossed clay pipes on the floor, while wearing bell pads on their shins. There are mummers plays which center around two characters engaging in faux combat, with the defeated being revived by a doctor character.
And the event culminates in a meeting on the old Wye Bridge that connects England and Wales, a symbolic move celebrating the border between the two countries.
But the standout feature of the festivities are the people dressed as Mari Lwyds, who decorate their horse costumes the traditional way, with ribbons and bells, as well as with modern updates, such as putting Christmas ornaments in the skull’s eye sockets. There’s even a competition for the best “dressed” Mari Lwyd.
The night culminates with revelers parading through town, knocking on the doors of homes and pubs, carrying out the Mari Lwyd tradition.
Those who’ve attended the festivities and posted photos on Instagram have called it “a very surreal experience” or said that it’s given them “goosebumps.”
One joked that it was “just a standard Welsh Friday night.”
Wassailing, a mostly English practice, is a lot like the Mari Lwyd tradition except that it lacks the creepy horse costume. Credited as being a forerunner to both Christmas caroling and trick-or-treating, it involved peasants knocking on the doors of their wealthier neighbors during the yuletide in the hopes of being offered a drink from their “wassail bowl” (a type of mulled cider), or to ask for food and drink in exchange for blessings and good cheer. It was essentially a tradition that condoned begging, allowing peasants to absolve themselves of the stigma of doing so for a short portion of the year.
Mari Lwyd was one of several “hooded animal” customs that took place in various pockets throughout Great Britain. In these folk customs, farm laborers would break into teams, playing roles that usually included a butcher, a devil character, and a man dressed in women’s clothing.
The centerpiece of each team, however, was the animal head perched atop a pole, with a sack cloth under which the person holding the pole could hide from view.
South-central England’s ritual was called The Broad and featured a bull’s head, while in northeastern England, you’d find both goat’s and horse’s heads on poles.
Why a horse’s head?
Well, because Britain has had a preoccupation with horses — especially white ones — for a few millennia.
There are several images of white horses carved into various hillsides, such as the Uffington White Horse and the Westbury White Horse, which have come to symbolize the south of England, the region that borders Wales. However, like much about the Mari Lwyd’s origins, documentation is scarce.
The custom continues to flourish in other ways throughout the country, especially among the younger generations. One Redditor recounted practicing it as a kid in school.
In fact, an organization called Trac that is dedicated to preserving and growing Wales’ “folk development,” sold, for a time, a vegan-friendly Mari Lwyd horse head made of cardboard “since actual horse skulls are heavy, hard to come by, and cost hundreds of pounds.”
With each passing year, the numbers of attendees at the Chepstow Wassail and Mari Lwyd event has grown as the traditions garner increasingly more interest. In fact, the event’s organizers announce some bad news this year because of their expanding popularity. To revelers’ dismay, there will be no event in early 2020 due to the lack of a facility big enough to host everyone.
“We have therefore decided that it is time for us to take a sabbatical,” they wrote, “to recharge our own energies and rethink the future direction of the event.”
In the meantime, several other Mari Lwyd-centric events have cropped up around the world, like Krampusnacht Parade in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, The Melbourne Gothic and Victorian Picnic in Melbourne, Australia, and The Witches’ Night Out Market New England in Providence, Rhode Island.
As for the Chepstow event, the organizers are emphatic that their new-old celebration will return in 2021. Having brought a dead horse back to life, they assure, “We will not let it go away.”
(This article was originally published on Dec. 16, 2019)
Marybeth Connaughton is a writer originally from Boston who can usually be found in a gallery or coffee shop.
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